The discomforting cadence of Youssef Chahine's 'Cairo Station'

Youssef Chahine was to Egyptian cinema what, for example, Satyajit Ray was to Indian cinema and Akira Kurosawa to Japanese cinema. If someone is looking to get into Egyptian cinema for the first time, Chahine would be the ideal place to start. For this writer, his 1958 film Cairo Station (also called Bab el-Hadid, or "The Iron Gate") is the perfect entry point. This is especially true for serious Indian cineastes. The reasons are several. To begin with, the too-familiar image of the train station, which not only announces the arrival and departure of locomotives from various destinations, but also serves as a catalyst for the beginning and ending of someone's careers and lives. The train station is often associated with tragic events, some informed by the newspapers, others witnessed unwillingly by daily commuters.

Chahine's film — bearing strong influences of the Italian neorealism movement and film noir — opens with the voiceover of the station's chief newsagent, Madbouli (Haasan el Baroudi), an old man who, when not uttering his daily prayers, is busy observing daily occurrences. He comes off as someone who has seen way too much. It’s possible that the rosary in his hands prepares him for any trauma-inducing eventuality — and later deal with its memory. The man's narration, which precedes the opening credits, tells us that sometimes he witnesses events stranger than the ones he reads in the papers. Something disturbing will happen soon, and before it does, Chahine, as though to hammer home the point of the salability and sensationalist appeal of tragedy, inserts an image of a knife concealed in a newspaper.

A filmmaker with a cosmopolitan sensibility, Chahine is both director and actor, directing himself as the crippled protagonist Kenawi, a vagrant rescued by Madbouli and turned into a news vendor. Madbouli will soon come to regret his decision when he realises that Kenawi is not only mentally unsound but also sexually frustrated. And in a constantly teeming venue bustling with incessant activity, that's not good news. Meanwhile, we are told of a vicious murderer wreaking havoc. The true-blue newspaperman that he is, Madbouli relates every gruesome detail to Kenawi.

The train station is also home to many other residents. We are then introduced to the female cool drink seller, Hannuma (Hind Rostom), who becomes the object of Kenawi's affection. The most prominent among them is a porter, Abu Serih (Farid Shawqi), who dreams of forming a union to ward off exploitation and find improved working conditions. Things get more complicated when we learn that Abu is Hannuma's would-be, instantly rendering Kenawi’s love story one-sided.

Chahine tells the story through a fair amount of close-ups, mostly of Kenawai's eyes, and, in one unsettling juxtaposition, of a cat. Parallels can be drawn to Robert De Niro's portrayal of the sexually repressed Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's iconic 1976 film, Taxi Driver. Bickle frequented pornographic theatres; Kenawi has centrespreads of scantily-clad women adorning the walls of his ramshackle dwelling. Where the two films differ is in the direction in which their makers take their characters. Chahine's intentions, we learn soon, are relatively bleak — possibly a major reason for the film's box-office failure when it was first released. Moreover, Chahine presents several other characters, with varying screen durations and complex, implicitly suggested characteristics that both the left and right would find unacceptable.

Chahine didn't shy away from on-the-nose depictions elsewhere. In brief stretches placed in different parts of the film, we see: staunchly conservative men voicing their disapproval of youngsters dancing to Western music; a women's liberation group protesting against marriage; police constantly trying to apprehend Hannuma and her women gang's illegal soda-selling business; and Hannuma's independent-submissive duality when it comes to her dynamic with different kinds of men. That the film was made in the wake of the Egyptian revolution of 1952, which turned a kingdom into a republic, accords it bigger significance. The era of the reformist President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's second, encouraged the creation of social-realist films that depicted working-class struggles with the sensitivity and anger they demanded.

Would Cairo Station get made today? Unlikely, according to film critic, curator, and lecturer Joseph Fahim. In his insightful Criterion essay, he observes that with the "authoritarian leader" currently in power, one can only dream of making cinema of this variety. "Censorship has hardened over the past decade, surpassing the sternest of the Nasser years," adds Fahim. "Acute social changes and a political climate hostile toward critical art have eliminated any chance of films like Cairo Station being made."